Society

According to the last census in 2011, 7.19 million people live in Serbia. Out of the whole population, 51.3% are women and 48.7% are men, while the average age is 42.2 years.

According to projections of the Ipsos Strategic Marketing agency, the population will decrease over the next 25 years to 6.18 million people.

The results of the same census also show that the illiteracy rate was halved compared to the previous census conducted in 2002. Out of the total population older than 10 years, there are 6.5 million literate and 127,463 illiterate people. There are far more - four times - illiterate women (104,000 ) than men (23,000).

It is noteworthy that still, almost 164,000 people remain without a loaf of education, while more than half a million people, almost 10% of the overall population, have an incomplete primary education (around 677,000 people).

Serbia’s unemployment rate decreased by 0.7% compared to the previous year. In the first quarter of 2017 the unemployment rate stood at 14.6%, while in 2016 it was 15.3%.

The last official statistics show that in Serbia 2,656,200 people are formally employed. A little more than half a million people are informally employed, which means that they work in unregistered companies or registered ones but without a formal contract and without social and pension insurance, or they have been unpaid for working as a help to members of the household.

It is important to stress that in Serbia, in the era of new technologies, only one-third of the population is computer literate while half of the population older than 15 years do not fully know how to use computers or is computer illiterate completely.

The official language is Serbian. In terms of ethnicity, the Republic of Serbia is a multi-ethnic country. Beside Serbs who account for 83% of the population (5,988,150), the most numerous are Hungarians (253,899), Roma (147,604) and Bosniaks (145,278).